Adaptive Optimal Control of Twin-Rotor Helicopter System; Meta-heuristics and Lyapunov based Approach

Abstract The novelty of the proposed control approach lies in hybridization of control technique based on Nonsingular Terminal Sliding Mode (NTSM) Control, metaheuristic optimization algorithms and adaptive super-twisting based on Lyapunov stability analysis for controlling Quanser Aero simulator helicopter. Firstly, the he NTSM and NTSM Super Twisting (NTSTW) controllers are designed Followed by optimization of the designed controllers using Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) and Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO). Qualitative and quantitative comparisons between the obtained optimized controllers is then thoroughly analyzed. Results confirmed that the Optimized NTSTW (O-NTSTW) based on GWO demonstrated overperformance compared with other controllers. In order to achieve superior performance with robustness, this controller is hybridized with an adaptive Lyapunov super-twisting algorithm resulting in a new controller Adaptive O-NTSTW (AO-NTSTW). Visualization using ROS-Gazebo is done while validating AONTSTW and O-NTSTW.Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness and the superiority of AO-NTSTW compared to O-NTSTW.